Their chief subject, though, is motherhood, specifically queer, single motherhood, and the terrifying, sometimes overwhelming, ever surprising ways in which that experience affects the soma, the self, one’s interactions with and new appreciation for the ephemerality of every living thing. Zero at the Bone contended with loneliness and longing—for love, for belonging, the (im)possibilities of erotic intimacy—and these preoccupations carry over into Each Luminous Thing with fresh urgency as the speaker falls into helpless and seismic unconditional love with the three daughters whom she must protect and nurture as best she can. — Lisa Russ Spaar, The Adroit Journal, 2024 

Cassarino traces dual paths on earth’s surface and through motherhood, rife with wonder and fear at her child “exposed / to the whole disentangled world before us.” — The New York Times Book Review, 2023

Care, from carry: as happens mysteriously in utero; from what was once her single-selfed existence, the poet assumes the burdens of maternity—a carrier‘s nine-month care package that stretches into motherhood and beyond. In Each Luminous Thing, Stacie Cassarino’s three daughters serve as her “sources of luminosity,” a stellar second act to her Lamda Literary Award-winning debut, Zero at Bone. — Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews, 2023

Each Luminous Thing roves the ledges of wonder and worry raised by what we hold dear. Honoring the wilderness of insight, Stacie Cassarino tracks curiosity’s difficult grace through the murky fields of hope and fear. Bless this astonishing book—its sacred pursuit of belonging, its staggering contact with beauty, its abiding belief in bearing more deeply the awesomeness and agonies of love’s transformational power. — Geffrey Michael Davis

If the most potent losses are always contained within the flush of any subsequent grace, then Stacie Cassarino’s Each Luminous Thing reads like one long, deep, desperate, reverberating wish that has been answered. At the heart of this collection are the speaker’s daughters, as well those beloveds—friends, lovers, elders—lost along the path to queer motherhood, so that even the poems in this collection that celebrate the bringing of life into the world feel written as a series of elegies, each loss ‘indecipherable from the splendor // of the world and what it keeps / giving.’ There are those rare second books—quiet and aching with the labor of their long arrival—that I have been happy to wait and wish for. This is one of them. — Keetje Kuipers

Stacie Cassarino’s second collection, Each Luminous Thing, explores the joys and thrills and, yes, the terrors of motherhood. These are poems caught between the delights of life and the certainty of death. Cassarino never forgets that there’s nothing truly domestic about being a mother; it’s always an adventure in the natural world — Ron Charles, The Washington Post, 2023